When students come to class today, they know they're going to have an entrance ticket that contains a text dependent question that will be used for an assessment. They walk in an begin right away.

The reason behind this entrance ticket is the focus of yesterday's lesson was to work together and coach partners to answer text dependent questions. The students worked together to answer questions using this coaching format and today I want to see if there is improvement in their answers.

Resources (1)

Resources

After I collect the entrance tickets, I hold up both books and tell the students that there are similarities and differences in both texts in character, conflict and theme and that we're going to work to write a compare and contrast paragraph about both books.

My students are familiar with the compare/ contrast paragraph, but I want to do a refresher before we get to the one that deals with theme. I turn on the Smartboard to reveal a graphic organizer. I hand out the same graphic organizer to the students and give them five minutes to write all the similarities and differences they can think of between Mr. Lincoln's Way and ThankYou, Mr. Falker.

After the five minutes, I instruct the students to draw a line under their own thoughts so they can record any thoughts they missed under the line. I call students up to the Smartboard to begin recording their thoughts on similarities and differences.

Resources

We finish recording the similarities and differences and it is time to create the rubric. It is important to create the rubric with the students rather than just going over it with them. Creating the rubric with the students creates an engagement that doesn't happen by just handing out a rubric and going over it.

Once we create the rubric, I prepare students for the coming day. Tomorrow, they will begin writing their paragraph to compare our two most recent books.